How teaching made me a better engineer and manager
It helped me to 📈 grow from engineer all the way to CTO in less than 10 years!
Intro
This may sound a bit counterintuitive and you may wonder: “How will teaching others help me to progress in my career? I am spending my valuable time on helping others, which I could spend on learning something new”.
I’ve been there and I thought exactly that way.
Well, make sure to read on! By the end of this article, you’ll:
never wonder again if you should focus on teaching others or not and
understand why teaching is something that you should focus on in order to progress in your career.
I am sharing my mistakes with you that I made, especially early on in my career where I didn’t focus on helping and teaching others, which was a big mistake.
This is an article for paid subscribers, and here is the full index:
- I used to hate teaching others
- I wanted to learn everything myself
🔒 This is how I changed my mindset
🔒 I focused on helping and teaching others
🔒 When teaching, you help others and you also cement your knowledge on particular topics
🔒 Teaching has helped me immensely with growing from Senior all the way to CTO
🔒 Helping and teaching others by writing online has helped me immensely in my role as a full-time CTO
🔒 Teaching a course and public speaking increases my perspective and knowledge further
🔒 Last words
Let’s go straight into it.
I used to hate teaching others
And the reason for this is that I viewed everything as competition. I compared with others regularly and I didn’t want to help, because I thought they would get better than me if I would.
This was especially prominent when I was a jr. Software Engineer. I always had the huge drive and motivation to get better and better, but I could grow a lot faster if I would change my mindset sooner.
The mindset of helping and teaching others. This is the abundance mindset. The exact mindset that makes all of us winners.
If we help and teach others → others will help and teach us. This is 100% true and I’ll tell you why in this article.
I wanted to learn everything myself
Similarly, as I did with teaching others, I approached toward learning. I thought that others will view me as not a capable engineer if I asked for help.
I thought that vulnerability is a bad thing, but on the contrary, it builds trust and bonds with your colleagues.
As a self-taught engineer, my go-to was to always learn in isolation. Learn from tutorials, build projects or read books.
Well, that definitely got me somewhere, but you know how the saying goes:
What got you here, won’t get you there!
This quote is from the title of the book by Marshall Goldsmith: What Got You Here Won't Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful. I’d definitely recommend it.
Let’s get next into what motivated me to change the mindset.